I have been gaming for 35 years, and in the 15 of those where I have played first person shooters, no controller compares. Even when I'm playing other kinds of games, the ability to do everything without having to remove your finger from the pads to hit buttons, the size is perfect, everything is so responsive.
They "feel" cheap, but I don't care. They are gaming nirvana for me.
Only things I don't like are the bumper buttons and I'd much rather USB C than micro usb.
I wish they would make an SC 2 with fixed bumpers, ditching the thumbsticks for bigger trackpads with more advanced haptics and a doubling of paddle buttons like with this new device.
What?? Like you flip the controller upside down to open the map? How do you set that up?
Fewer than people think, in my opinion. Snake Pass and Outer Wilds insisted to me that they would be better with a controller and both were wrong.
Not every game will be a perfect fit, certainly, but I've had a great time with my Steam Controller playing things like XCOM, Prey (2017), and Divinity Original Sin. IIRC Civilization 5 was explicitly a part of the advertising for the controller in the first place, as a way to play mouse-heavy games from the couch.
It's not the same as a mouse but it beats the pants off of thumbstick aiming.
> Lots of PC games can be played without K+M, what's your point again?
The comment you were replying to directly answers you question about the point:
> PC games are built with power in mind that Switch does not have
The part of comment about "can be played without K+M" is entirely irrelevant to what I am saying because the preference _for_ K+M is the premise of this whole comment subtree.
But I agree with what you're saying. If this thing is actually good, it could have some real mainstream appeal.
Steam chords are brilliant. If you have a steam controller and don't know about steam chords, go look it up. Life changing.
The biggest single win for me is replacing the right stick for camera control, as the trackball emulation with haptics on the touchpad is so much faster and more responsive than a traditional thumbstick. There are some games that I'd still prefer the standard twin sticks or dpad (twin-stick shooters maybe, some platformers, or hyper-specific designed games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons), but overall I've much preferred the touchpad over thumbsticks for almost every first- or third-person game I've played.
There are plenty of people with great things to say about it, but they largely seem to be people who wanted to play FPS games without a mouse and keyboard, and were willing to put in some effort to get it configured right. I can imagine it being more successful if it had gotten first-class out-of-the-box support for more games, but it seems like it never reached the level of adoption where that was worth it for developers.
I've never tried it myself, though. If the Steam Deck is a success, maybe we'll see the Steam Controller model finally take off (since the Deck has similar touchpads built in). Or maybe it will be like the Kinect, a pet feature deleted in later hardware revisions.
It's also an interesting counterpoint to all the streaming services popping up these days. PC game streaming to mobile has major downsides, even more so when you're away from stable and fast internet. Until 5G is everywhere and mobile bandwidth [soft] caps aren't a thing anymore, a mobile device that can play games locally will be a much more attractive option for a lot of people.